The purpose of this blog is to facilitate discussions by the participants about Project 366

Sunday, January 22, 2017

Kit Kelen - rather a long rant about it all

Kit's
366 metablog comments in January 2017

Project
366 was an on-line community of practice that ran for the whole of
2016 (a leap year, hence the 366). Over that time, about 120 poets
and artists contributed, some daily for the year, some daily for a
month, and some more occasionally. The project involved the posting
of about 7000 draft works throughout 2016 and had about 300,000
visits to the blog. And it's still going (though at a slower pace) at
http://project365plus.blogspot.com.au/
(because some people just can't help themselves). It also has a
meta-blog, where people have been discussing the experience.

While
we're giving the vital statistics: for me personally, posting to the
366 blog involved putting up more than six hundred pages of drafts
from a word file that had more than a thousand pages of rough notes
by the end of the year (and which is still growing, in both ways, at
the time of writing).

Daily
practice might be a hard thing to get going, but once embarked upon,
it has a way of insisting on its part of your day, its place in your
head, its trace in the records you keep.

In
terms of the geo-political context, 2016 was the year of Brexit and
the Trump ascendancy; a seeming definitive end to the possibibility
of positive politics – i.e. of electorates actually voting for
someone or something. As if the
true believers of the political landscape had finally and
definitively come under the water level. 2016 was of course the
hottest year ever again, so we witnessed the rise of climate-change
deniers, like Trump, just as
the truth of global warming was becoming even more undeniable.
Among all the various horrors entailed in making Trump
the most powerful person in the world, the most horrible, for me, was
the feeling that democracy had simply given up on the planet.

Why
did I start this thing? What was I thinking?

(Play
with the supra-segmental tone here to have some irony or not.)

I
proceed in a sort of a haibun style.

And
note that in this piece I deal almost exclusively with the poetry
side of the project, on the basis that it was billed as a
poetry-centric activity.

I
think poetry, and art more generally, should be a community, rather
than a competition. I think poetry is, most essentially, a process.
Poetry is a thing we do, especially if we're poets (which I suppose
means, if others come to think of us this way). Regularity is a key
for me though. You can't be a street sweeper if you don't sweep
streets. It's not just a lifestyle thing.

I
think poetry has no natural geographical or political borders, though
it has obvious language borders. I say this because it bugs me that
poetry is arranged on so much of a national basis in the world today.
Because of funding, because of academia (and the academic reception
of poetry as an artform), because even the most creative and
cosmopolitan of wordworkers find it hard to see beyond the national
context in which they are forced to imagine themselves and their
work. Poetry does come from somewhere and hopefully has destinations
in terms of readership, but as far as borders are concerned, poetry
has the function of getting through them, slipping under or over,
breaking them down. The something that doesn't love a wall is poetry,
or ought to be. There's a lot of fun and a lot of poetry in the
crossing borders, in lifting a leg on the wall. And there's important
work in recognising the presence of borders others cannot, or choose
not to see. As Auden wrote:
'The
greatest writer cannot see through a brick wall but unlike the rest
of us, he does not build one.'

Yes,
folks, poetry has functions. Because it is, again most essentially, a
form of speech. And speech is for getting things done, for making
things happen, for bearing witness as well. Poetry is a way of
speaking with the world. With, about, of and for, under and over –
every preposition is in on the act. And poetry should make you
re-think them – the positions and the pre-positions – among
things, among processes, actions, acts.

Poetry
is as spoken as it is written, though this is not something our blog
has been able to demonstrate.

In
the circumstances of our community of practice, poetry inscribed on
the screen is a kind of pseudo-speech. As is the commentary and the q
and a that follows. Speech is full of echoes.

the echoing

at the turn of the tune

know all these things

were in the years

always a voice

the waking comes

as if it were only mine

a voice uplifts

even sotto voce

an orchestra sawing itself off a limb

with only a violin bow

that's my beautiful civilisation

we witness

writing is always descent

the mind's a thinking up

the heart is where we find it

a story tells no tales of its telling

a song is just this voice now

So
poetry is process, is community, is something we do and something we
say to each other. All of this is more important than being in a
book, however important it is for us that poetry has a past (as most
commonly available to us in the form of a book's pages or their
virtual approximation).

We
live in an age where every form and instance of thought finds some
computer analogy, as if the human (and every other) brain were
striving to attain the level of complexity of a human-made machine.
This paradoxical (perhaps nonsensical?) wishing to understand
ourselves as machines has been going on for a few centuries now
(especially since Descartes) but seems to have reached a fever pitch
with the current mania for cognitivism, and the making of a science
from everything creative, for every kind of brain entertainment.
Witness – the future is the prime atavism we face. Witness – the
resurgence of nationalisms, their burial in pseudo-religious
rhetoric. Witness Trump. The impossible future is with us now and
this seems to be a more dangerous place than the one we inhabited
before.

Where
is poetry in the 24 hour news cycle? With facebook? In the post-truth
world? With so many threats to the idea of democracy, with democracy
itself an apparent global threat, popular will seems like a shaken
idea. Is poetry in these circumstances a store of fixed wisdom (a
corpus open to the work of interpretation)? I do think that is true.
And the same can be said of philosophy and the novel and music and
Shakespeare and painting... And poetry is also a thing we can do.
What sort of a power is it we exercise by doing poetry, by spending
time with poetry – trying to understand it, trying to respond to
it? Is it a still centre to our lives, a place that can hold in the
chaos, a meditative space for reflection? I hope it's a space in
which we can look again, think again, and not simply accept the
world-as-given. See ourselves as part of a dialogue, as part of the
process of contention as to what the world can be.

I
hope that poetry is more like a forest than a factory. A garden
would be a good compromise. What makes the garden go? Not one or
five or a hundred plants but all the different shapes and sizes,
colours, rates of growth, ways of going. What makes it go is that
it's going, growing. It's always at once, you'll never see the whole
of it. That's why the birds come and after the insects. That's why
you see, because the eye was made for it. Start counting it all,
start getting it all into files and folders – you're just having
fun with more mind-forged manacles.

Let's
have some wonder for wilderness, some wonder for the garden, some
wonder for being where we won't know ourselves. That has to be where
we are.

I
don't know what you'll write tomorrow. I don't know what I'll write
either. I think that's a good space in which to be together.

What
sort of an eco-system was/is 366?

The
flowers blooming and the schools contending? Where are we in all of
this?

In
poetry.

And
I was in Europe, and in Australia and in Macao. And back in Australia
again. And now I'm writing this back in Macao. Just for the record.
Apologies for the carbon footprint. But I did get the solar panels on
my roof in 2016.

That
was just me. Others were elsewhere. But more were in Australia than
anywhere else. A case of who you know.

Poetry
in Australia is in a very healthy state, and it has been for some
time. Healthy in the sense that lots of good poetry is being written.
And it's getting healthier and healthier; it's already so healthy no
one can read it all. Take a look each year at Best Australian
Poetry or, for longer poems, The Newcastle Prize anthology. These
very limited and (probably necessarily) biased snapshots show you
just how healthy things are. You'll especially notice the contrast if
you compare annually with Best American Poetry. Often a lot of
wading through the shallows there.

In
poetry in Australia – there are in my estimation about 500 people
seriously doing it and who have been doing it over some length of
time. A few dozen (a significant number) of them were involved in
Project 366 during 2016. Some still are as I write this. By doing it
seriously, I am speaking mainly of lives – one way and another –
devoted to poetry. True believers. (Now and then a ring-in wins a
prize and all are shocked but not as shocked as when a true-believer
wins too many prizes!) Outside of the 'serious', many more dabbling
here and there. I should say the serious poets + the dabblers
outnumber the serious readership (as opposed to the dabbling
readership [Henry Lawson on the shelf]). Meaning the readers of
poetry in Australia are by and large poets. Meaning among other
things that to speak of commercial viability of poetry as an artform
in Australia is a joke (or rather a powerful delusion, from which an
extraordinary number of people, not least of all, poets, suffer). Let
me be clear – there are various command economies entailed in
poetry's reception in a country like Australia. So money can be made
by or for poets/poetry, associated with school or university
syllabuses (i.e. compulsory encounters with poetry), grants and
prizes. Little livings can be made in the short term through
residencies.

Making
a living out of poetry is something I suppose I've in fact been doing
for years, though not in any way my employer would have condoned or
considered as such, and certainly not by selling poems to anyone. I
would be a lean and hungry fellow had I been waiting for that ship to
come in. Rather I have been able to coordinate a number of
inter-related poetry-oriented teaching and research activities in
order to keep an academic career afloat. National
anthems and poems about children and animals have been my most recent
objects of interest. I think a sizeable
minority of poets have been able to patch something like this
together for themselves by way of a
living. A
living from poetry is a life path full
of contradictions and accommodations, compromises. That
said, I do believe anthems and children and animals are of great
interest and deserve more attention.

How
to get the money side of the poetry business into perspective? I
think there are some theoretical tools that may helpfully guide us
here. Robert Graves is famous for saying something like there may not
be much poetry in money but there's even less money in poetry. Poetry
and money are a great ambivalence generating combo. Why should we
pretend things could or did or do run on a commercial basis where
poetry is concerned? But why shouldn't people get paid to do it?
Should the union be onto 366 participants for giving the stuff away?
(Ah, halcyon days! Remember when we had a union?)

But
on the other hand, why should poetry be limited to
any kind of money economy? Should poetry
not be created if no one is paying for it to be created? We could
find ourselves downing tools for a very long time were we to follow
that principle.

In a
capitalist economy, and in some other economies before capitalism,
labour is alienated – the process of performing labour for others
divorces the one working from her/his own potentials and vital
energies and life choices (in the immediate as in the longer term).
The practice of art is the opposite of alienation. Making art you
reclaim your life. Let's say it's what we're here for. So-called
'primitive' people spent a lot more of their time doing art and
culture than so-called industrial and post-industrial people have
been able to do. I think they had a better lifestyle overall, at
least in that regard. If you can feed yourself, keep a roof overhead
and the rodents out, stay warm in winter, then why do you need to
work in a dull job? Time for art is time for self-realization, paid
or not. If that means that work and play ought ultimately to be
indistinguishable then so be it! I'm not really sure if that was what
Herbert Read was teaching but it's what I learned from him. I call my
creed anarchist hedonism (which is really just a contemporary take on
the doctrine of Epicurus – which I take as being, we should all
have a good time). The way we have a good time is by making what
we will of the world, making our world together, within the limits
given, with due consideration for the wishes of others. With peace
and with friendship as our highest attainable goals. Making this our
art. Making art from this.

So
the necessity of doing art presents us with political struggles of a
kind that are far more fundamental than the question of whether
particular instances of art work are paid for or not. And still,
inherited wealth aside, whether by being paid for doing art, or by
being paid to do something else, we do need each to make some kind of
treaty with everyday economic realities of the kind that pay the rent
and put food on the table. While many of us
have worked out practical day-to-day accommodations (enabling us
not to have think too much about this
stuff), I do not think that the questions about art and money
mentioned above are easy questions with obvious answers.

Pierre
Bourdieu's idea of an avant-garde artworld as the economic world
reversed is a useful construct for thinking
this through. Bourdieu
writes that the 'economy of practices' in his 'autonomous sector of
the field of cultural production' amounts to a reversal of the
economic world – 'in a generalized game of “loser wins”, on a
systematic inversion of the fundamental principles of all ordinary
economies' Poetry, is in these circumstances, for Bourdieu 'the
disinterested activity par
excellence'.

How
to reconcile these lives lived partly in the economic real-world,
partly in its reversal in the world of art-making – in an outside
of that normal space in which money is the measure of everything.

Michel
de Certeau's idea of the perruque
is a helpful for thinking this through. The perruque is
a kind of bricolage, but it is more specifically what de Certeau
thinks of as 'time stolen from official consciousness' – the love
letter written by the secretary in the moments she can steal, the
wooden toy the carpenter makes in the workshop for his kid when the
lathe is otherwise unoccupied. The poem. The poem by pretty well
anyone anytime (as long as they're not a poet lorikeet or on a grant
or something). That's to say the poem when it's at home is generally
some kind of a perruque. It's the thing you're doing when you might
been doing something you were meant to do, when you might have been
gainfully employed..

I
think one of the hard things for poets when they retire from their
otherwise gainful employment (aka day job) is that they are suddenly
and unceremoniously deprived of their perruque.
From whom should they steal time now? They can only steal it from
themselves. And this might seem not quite right, or at the very least
it might take a little adjusting to.

Let's
consider in a little more detail then this question of where the time
for poetry comes from. I think more than anything else it has to come
from a kind of self-belief, again, the opposite of alienation. I
think this self-belief (close relative of self-regard/self-esttem)
can be encouraged. I think this is a function of community, likewise
of family, likewise of a school that is a place where real questions
are asked, as opposed to being merely an institution for the
reproduction of existing ideological conditions.

There
are all manner of ways in which poets and poetry might be encouraged.
As far as the presence of poetry is concerned, we should be no more
surprised at the disappearance of poetry from newspapers in recent
years than we should be at the disappearance of the short story from
the tabloids in the sixties. Consider who owns newspapers and why.
Consider how newspapers compete for market share. (Note that in Macao
there are papers that publish poems every day [in Chinese of course]
and this is a great encouragement to young poets, of whom there are
many in Macao, likewise across the border on the Mainland.)

On
the 'level playing field', in the 'open market', exceptionally, a
notional peak product like Best Australian Poetry
might turn a profit, but this is a very rare thing (aside of
collections able to set as class texts). And of course one can and
should see that kind of product as enabled by the various command
economies of poetry in Australia, that do, among, other things,
create poets and readerships (even if these categories of person do
largely overlap). Likewise judicious print-on-demand might be
profitable on very low volumes, if the books are expensive enough and
if authors and their close cohorts come to the aid of the party. Rob
Riel pioneered this and David Musgrave is a master of the art. Long
live Newcastle and the Hunter!

But
there aren't many punters out there (ones who are neither makers or
critics of the stuff), collecting and keeping up with the latest
thing in Australian poetry, when for instance there are many many
such punters in the case of popular music or popular culture, or
sport, more generally. I personally think that's a great shame,
simply because there is so much and such varied great material being
produced (so unprofitably, if not selflessly) by the noble 500 I
mentioned before. And of course it's easy to be involved and to
follow in the case of popular culture: simply turn on the telly or
the wireless. You won't get very much poetry out of these machines.
We're supposed to believe that that's because nobody wants it. I'll
leave for the moment the question of how spontaneous, or to what
degree manufactured, such opinion might be.

And
let me interrupt myself to say again – it pains me to write of
Australian poetry, as if poetry were something of this
national construct to which I belong and in part adhere. It pains me
to write of newspapers and mass media and punters and livings when my
theme is the making of poetry and the making of poetry's community.
But here we are in media res. Eyes
open to the objective conditions.

And
to our objective conditions.

For
a long time I believed that poetry should be banned in schools in
Australia, that driving it 'underground' might give it a chance of
acceptance, of finding the enthusiasm it deserves. I'm much more
ambivalent about poetry in institutions of learning now, having been
involved with it for so long, having made a living out of it from
time to time (albeit generally overseas), and seeing how many people
do get to discover poems and poets and poetry through institutional
means.

Making
Poetry Possible

You
see, all along, I was a believer in poetry. Which of course means
that I was (and still am) a believer in the traditions that make
poetry, that make the making of poetry possible. That's to say, I do
not believe that poetry is some moveable feast or signifier floating
about for the convenience of an elite culture. I think that those who
make poems in an intelligent way, on the basis of reading as well as
feeling, are connected with a knowledge of all the pasts of poetry.
Like Freud's all the cities that were Rome co-existing to illustrate
the idea of the unconscious (in 'Civilisation and its Discontents') –
all the poetries of the past and of elsewhere are with us here and
now – we only have to read. We have a duty to read. People who tell
you they don't read because they're worried it might influence them
in some way are kidding themselves that they're poets. On the other
hand, those who decide to be highly selective in their reading might
be quite sensibly honing their best intelligence for the task they
see as theirs. I wish I were better at that, less omnivorous. In
every case though, there is a kind of canonic (so highly mediated)
knowledge that allows to be who would choose to be as poets. Academic
training might help you along here, might also be the death blow.
Poetry's true believers are at heart all auto-didact though: they
read there for themselves, however awful or wonderful or lacking the
guidance on the way.

However
one comes by it, canonic knowledge is inevitable, a knowledge that is
to say of the corpus of work surviving from other ages and cultures,
and constituting the totality we understand in common as poetry
(however much, and however justly, one struggles against totalities).
Harold Bloom tells us – who reads must choose. But the more
apposite observation would be that who reads without the advantage
of immortality must have their reading largely chosen for them.
That's where cultural and
educational elites show their dirty hands. How could they not? Even
the auto-didact only gets to read what's been organised to survive on
the shelves somewhere, Dark Ages notwithstanding. (One happily notes
that in the case of Chinese poetry, there having been no Dark Ages in
quite the way we know in the West, the extant archive is immense [and
often largely untranslated]).

How
dark is the Age now? Who darkens our doorstep? Let's leave the
obvious answer, Trump, for the moment. (I'm finishing this piece on
the day of his inaurguration.)

I
also believe that there is deep
disrespect for poetry in Australian culture, and it is a disrespect
that comes from a kind of cultural/intellectual laziness, an
unwillingness to think or feel further than necessary, a reluctance
to think or feel further than one has thought or felt before. The
same sort of thing applied to soccer when I was a kid, so there's
some hope that things can change. A large part of the population
fiercely resists this barbarous condescension of living culture and a
large part of the population practises it with a vengeance. The
disdain that is dished out to effete and often congealed culture
(opera, ballet) is equally applied to the vanguard of word work in
Australia. Those at the cutting edge of how we express and so see
ourselves are seen to be pretentious posers, putting on airs. Are
there among us any who feel that they could comfortably give their
occupation to anyone asking, as 'poet', without being thought of as
wankers? Without a high probability of being thought of as a wanker.
Without oneself suspecting that one might be a wanker to think of
oneself this way? Few sneer when they turn past the page with the
cryptic crossword. That's not because they're comfortable with the
cryptic crossword, it's because it's not a category of activity
they've ever noticed. There's no tall poppy there. And so on our
tombstones will be engraved 'Poetry was the main thing s/he did, but
s/he dared never call herself a poet'. Actually the cringe is
somewhat worse than I'm suggesting. Just to pick two persons I
mentioned earlier on – David Musgrave and Rob Riel. Or 366
participants for that matter – Susan Hawthorn and Anna Couani, Phil
Hammial, Chris Mansell – I don't want to go all national on you,
but why are they not at least OAMs for their services to Australian
poetry? I humbly submit that if they had done as much for the All
Australian Topiary Guild or the Gem Collectors' Society they most
certainly would be. So there's a big self-esteem issue here. For some
reason we've collectively allowed ourselves to be convinced by the
philistines of the relative worthlessness of the cultural form we
hold dearest and devote ourselves to, body and soul.

The
Noble 500 and the Enemy Within

Other
shadows loom over the practice of poetry in Australia. Enemies within
the citadel. The canonizing instruments of the here-and-now of high
culture, for instance. Not so much prizes. Although turning poetry
into a competition (despite the precedents in ancient theatre,
despite the slam delights today) is a bit of weird idea. The idea
that a poem should be thought of in terms of better or best, winner
or loser, is a little infantalising, let's say. But prizes at least
carry the benefit of helping the unknown of the Noble 500 be
discovered, at least by some of their brethren/fellow travellers.
Prizes can offer a huge moral boost and they can bring people into a
conversation from which they were otherwise excluded. Likewise
residencies and grants, and sometimes even teaching positions. Darker
and darker territory.

Beyond
the general idea that ballet and poetry are the anathema of sport,
the prime culprits casting the shadows over poetry as practice are
grants (as in Australia Council Grants), school and university
reading lists and definitive anthologies. That's because each of
these canonising instruments is, however it pretends otherwise, based
on selection and so exclusion, as doled out by persons (whether poets
or not) with position in hierarchies – those cultural elites that
right wing morons (press and parliamentary wings) rant on about,
knowing nothing of, but assuming sentences shouldn't end with
prepositions.

Let's
take these in turn. The grants.

OzCo
grants (and others) typically find their ethical pivot in the
illusion of peer review: the idea that you can't complain about the
results because they are from judgement by your peers. There are no
peers. Everyone thinks their stuff is better than every one else's
and they're waiting for the others to get off the stage so they can
have their place in the sun (as brilliantly expressed in Rae Desmond
Jones' great 70s poem, 'The Poets'). And there are other senses in
which peer review is a fiction. As we saw with the money side of
things in terms of book sales, there is no level economic playing
field in the here-and-now creation of literary value (a kind of
cultural capital). Poets, academics, reviewers – how wildly the
headgear circulates! – are persons with position and disposition.
They are from somewhere in a system of value. They are of tribes,
they swim in schools, they look after their own and the rest had
better look out for themselves. You have to be from somewhere to get
somewhere. That's not to say that talent isn't continually being
discovered. It is. If there were enough funding to go around to
foster the available talent, none of this would matter. But there are
piddling amounts to go around and there is a lot of talent. So
tribalism tends to win. Tough for those who are not the tribal type.

'Peer review'
is one of the more pernicious shams that has been perpetrated on an
artistic community

Based on the
lie of a level playing field of peerdom, it involves your creative
types, in a degree far more than is necessary, in a culture of
judging each other. So it puts people who ought to be sparking off
each other, collaboratively, in the position of rotating from and to
the judgement seat. Let's be clear – judgement is a necessary, an
inevitable, part of the individual process of finishing one's work to
a publishable standard. It is also an inevitable part of the process
of magazines and publishing houses (of which in both cases there are
sadly too few). But how necessary is it to the process of deciding
which poets ought to be able to set aside the day job for a spell to
focus on the making of poetry? And how
much
of a poet's time should be spent performing that sort of labour?

The
problem with the reading lists is more fraught, because this tends to
entail judgement by lit crit academics (who are typically not poets).
Speaking with high school English teachers (and having been one for
quite a while myself) – and particularly the ones who don't write
poetry – I get the feeling that they find it perfectly reasonable
there should be a first eleven in Australian poetry and a second
eleven, and leave it there. And they find it perfectly reasonable
that a bunch of non-poet academics would be making the call because
it seems reasonable to assume that poets would be too biased to do it
themselves. You can't really have a democratic cricket team, or footy
team, can you? And while we're at it – why not have a top poet, and
maybe a runner-up and some highly commendeds? One can see where these
ideas come from. But here's the thing. One might easily argue that
without Creative Writing in the academy there would be just as much
good writing going on as there is with it, and that one might be
dealing with a corpus overall less obscurantist, more communicative,
if the academic types got their paws off it. I can countenance that
critique, but I cannot countenance the idea that there would be the
flourishing state of Australian poetry we have today if it was just
Kinsella or Beveridge or Murray or Adamson or Tredinnick or Tranter,
and a little first and second eleven gathered at their side. (Which
of you won't have gasped at the mention of at least one of these
names?) This thinking is, not to disparage the fine works of these
folk, horrible – an anathema of poetry. Of poetry as practice and
as a community – of poetry as a community of practice. And I would
like to point out that it is not the fault of high school teachers
who don't write poetry or participate otherwise in poetry's
community/ies, that they should see it this way. They get their
impressions from somewhere. Nor is it the fault of the fine few they
cannonize.

As
for Creative Writing in the academy and the general utility of this
well-burgeoned
industry: yes there are sound existential doubts to strew in its
path, and what does not kill it might even make it strong.
Essentially, beyond the idea that it ornaments the university, there
are two reasons for teaching Creative Writing in the academy – what
I would call the canonic reason and the therapeutic reason. The
first, canonic, reason
is the idea that poetry (in the keep-able sense) has to come from
somewhere and if you don't teach it then where will it come from (?).
(This is along the lines of if no one learns how to build houses
there won't be any, if no one learns how to do brain surgery, then
our brains will never be mended.) The second is the idea that doing
Creative Writing is good for you – spiritually, morally,
psychologically, however. It might even mend the brain or some dark
region thereof. Personally, having
taught the stuff for a long time now I find the second reason a lot
more plausible than the first. But I would like to insist on one
point before conceding anything to the doubters. Cast whatever doubts
you like as to efficacy of Creative Writing pedagogy – is it less
justified than the whole faculties devoted to the praise of
capitalism or military hardware or the indoctrination of the young or
the justification of all sorts of normative nastiness as goes on
throughout academic institutions in a fairly generalised way (along
with lots of good stuff, of course – white hats and blacks and many
more grey)?

One
remembers Allen Ginsberg's famous 'word on the academies': 'poetry
has been attacked by an ignorant and frightened bunch of bores who
don't understand how it's made, and the trouble with these creeps is
that they wouldn't know poetry if it came up and buggered them in
broad daylight'. Nietzschean! Even though I still have a dayjob as an
ignorant frightened bore, I never manage to get offended by this
challenge of Ginsberg's. But you see how opinionated poets need to
be.

Reading
lists tend to be tepid and timid and are frequently geared to give
the impression that the canon they can't help but represent was
brought down from some mountain by some biblically bearded bloke who
just knew. When in fact Matthew Arnold invented the whole business
not so long ago. And Aust Lit is really not much past the teenager
stage (I don't mean the writing, I mean the academic discipline.) Not
to say that there aren't some great poems on those reading lists.
(Some of my best friends have been set, etc.) Not to say that
there isn't some great scholarship directed at some of the good
stuff. But most of the good stuff is well under the academic radar at
this stage of the game. Next hat!

The
anthologies.

on first looking into the latest anthology

every canon
is a clique

let
large

and often

leaks

says who's

in charge

and who

are
freaks

I prefer

a garden
tended

fences gone

won't need
mended

For instance
there's a recent anthology that might better have been titled My
White Friends – Some Living and Some Not So Perky.
Of course it's sour grapes to tell such truths in
or out of
school. But dammit, life is short. Why not
simply call your anthology A
Book of Me and Me Mates? Or Me and Me Mates and a Few
of Us Gone to Ground? What would be wrong with that refreshing
kind of honesty? The point is that it wouldn't be hard, especially in
on-line form, to really include everybody – that's to say, all of
the Noble 500. But it's never been done. Musgrave and Co may have
come closest with their recent effort. But opening that fine stopper
of doors, anyone who knows Australian poetry and poets runs out of
fingers and toes for the missing persons in no time flat. Okay, it
takes paper to publish a book in book form. But what about the
Webby/Tranter job on-line? No excuse there. The reason it's never
been done – the reason there has never in any format been a
properly inclusive anthology of Australian poetry, one that reflects
the reality of poetry on a national basis at a particular moment –
is that the selectors feel the need to exclude. They can't think too
much more democratically than putting together a cricket squad. If
someone doesn't lose then nobody's a winner. This is, I think, the
unconscious assumption at work. So I fancy myself as the rebel
anthologist – the one who puts between the same covers those who'd
rather not pass time in the same room.

When
I first started thinking poetry shouldn't be allowed in schools,
climate change denial had not been thought of. That's to say that
generic kind of anti-intellectualism had as yet no hold on the
popular and political imagination. But the loathing of poetry had
long been in full swing in Australia. I think it's entirely possible
that disrespect for poetry has given rise to climate change
skepticism. (I thought I should make an effort to get into the
post-truth swing of things.)

Summinng
up then. Peer review, reading lists, national anthologies. Canonic
knowledge is necessary to poets. We write from where we've read to.
We read from what has survived to us. But the star systems produced
through so called peer-review, through the force feeding that happens
in literature classes, through the production of national
anthologies, through the selection of poems for those venues (like
the few papers that publish or like Australian Poetry Journal
(the ones who can only take 2% of what's submitted) –
however fine their intentions, these institutions stifle poetic
practice, they homogenize (quite unwittingly I think), they make
everyone aim to fit on a page that every poet must picture. I truly
hope that projects like 366 are the opposite of that. Communities of
practice may necessarily be cliquey, but they are honestly so, and,
to the extent that they are open, have the capacity to liberate poets
from constraints of expectation.

Staging
One's Disappearance

Those
who've read this rant thus far are probably wondering why he needed
to cover so much territory. It's simply because there is a need to
render in words, for the record, an attitude to the territory from
which so many of us have carved so much time to spend together this
last year. (And I know quite a number of us are neither poets, nor
Australians. Nevertheless, Australian poetry was at the centre of
things and I hope that my analysis might be useful to those
participants who are not from this neck of the generic woods.)

In
truth few will have read to here. I feel like that naughty schoolkid,
writing something filthy in the middle of the essay, with the 'I
betcha stopped reading ages ago' tag. If I were on fb there'd be some
infantile dare and pass it on at this point. The joys of not being
read! Yes, I've been hard on the fantasists of poetry's economy. But
what of the joys of pretending readers who simply are not there?

life's
short

and

life's
towards a disappearance

that's
fact

we
should temper our moral outrage for suicide with this recognition

obscurity
is the garden I tend

in
which I'm growing ever in

song

the
unknown artist to his love

I
have found the vanishing point

come,
take my hand and let's be there

first
thing and last and in between

an
hour painting – there goes the day

not
just this but ages in it, same

with
book, or a few lines

point
to the boards, the canvas, tell

that's
where they were, in there, last scene

the
whole historical tribe – brushtailed

poets
spilling out of the frame

seeping
through to what's under, making

impression
of the thinnest air

a
wonderful thing so few have noticed

I
have found our vanishing point

come,
take my hand and let's be there

first
thing and last and in between

you
won't put a price on it, though they

feed
somehow, these creatures

it's
like pond life

to
the casual observer

ducks
take off so there's nothing

but
our days go on

first
thing and last and in between

I
have found our vanishing point

come,
let's just be there

It's
not just going up the country. Among poets, one has the chance of
perfect anonymity. There was a time when the letters of dead authors
were returned in neat little bundles tied up with string, and
archived somewhere, possibly published in some chest-crushing tome.
Not any more. Now that poets write more and write more to each other
(and more good, interesting stuff) than ever before, it's basically
all e-mail and blog and messenger and text and so totally lost to
posterity (as this little diatribe will be). Poets are the ideal lost
tribe of our time. Names writ on water? They inscribe thin air. Do we
all fully appreciate the freedom of the invisible we enjoy as poets?
A poem is a perfect place to stage one's disappearance.

Who
Wants to Practise in a Community?

You'll
probably also have noticed, if you're still with me, that I've not
quite yet solved all of the problems of Australian poetry, although
removing the word 'Australian' from most of the vocabulary most of
the time might go a good way to helping.

I
had a solution for the reading list problem – which was simply to
ban poetry altogether from institutions of learning. But, as I said,
I've had to re-think that one in order to gradually become less of a
hypocrite. I have suggested a solution for the anthology problem –
The Book of Me and Me Old China Plates.
There is a very simple solution for the pernicious culture of
so-called 'peer review'.

The ideal solution to the problem
of funding writers to write and artists to make art – and the
ideal solution to so many other problems of inequity/iniquity in our
economy/labour market – is a guaranteed universal income. I'm not
going to rehearse the arguments for the economic viability of such a
proposal, relative to stratospheric CEO salaries or multinational
mega-profits (these
inevitably matched with dole-torture);
I would simply say that the cultural benefit of de-stigmatizing the
parts of the population currently accused of sponging and bludging,
would in fact be nation building, would lead to improved productivity
and innovation in many many areas of the economy and would bring on a
cultural golden age, by removing from everyone willing, the most
fundamental excuse not to follow their creative star – that
being the need for
subsistence.

'You may say
I'm a dreamer'... Until such time as universal minimum income can be
introduced however, I recommend the peer review procedures of the
Australia Council be replaced by

a lottery
with clearly defined levels and qualifications. These will of course
be squabbled over

(numbers of
poems or books, numbers of reviews, the kind of citation
quantification crap that drives humanities academics mad) but will
not take much bureaucracy to administer. There would also be fairness
measures alongside, to ensure for instance that poets in particular
categories do not get awarded consecutive grants before others
eligible in the lottery have had a turn.

Do I
paint a contradictory picture? Then surely it's useful to try to work
through the contradictions, to understand one's ambivalence?

In
the world where poetry endlessly proliferates because more of us have
access to the means of becoming poets, because more and more of us
have the time and resources to produce the stuff, there yet remains
no convincing suggestion that there could be more readers. Not in a
country like Australia at any rate. Where could they come from? Even
for those poets in Australia who are interested in reading each
other's stuff, it's pretty near impossible to keep up. Even in
Project 366 – how many of the participants were able to read
everything every day, or over all?

The
simple fact is that there is more good and more bad poetry being
written in the world today, and in Australia for sure, than there
ever has been before. I prefer to see the cup half full.

Surely
as process becomes the focus of poetry's appreciation (in slams, on
blogs, in the hearts and minds) – as the emphasis moves from the
text on the shelf to the making of the stuff, we will see the
withering away of the canon? This may be the case, but I'm not myself
capable of either seeing this future or of wishing for it. Rather in
my
ideal world, editors and publishers pursue the mid-career poet for
the good stuff they can be sure she and he are churning out on a
daily basis, on the basis of the form for which they are known,
because there is a readership at their beck and call who care about
their culture and are hungry for this manna. This is what I try to do
with
my little meand as
an editor/publisher. I want to encourage through respect.

And
it's why I dreamt up Project 366 – as a kind of a show and tell
thing, I suppose. Project 52, the follow-up project, happening this
year, as I type, is more of a workshop thing – about finishing work
towards publication. But I suppose Project 366 was something of a
dare – to see if you could indeed post new draft poems every day
for a year. I kind of had an inkling I could do it myself because I'd
done a few months worth when on a residency in Norway in 2015, and
then later, on a smaller scale in Cyprus. Still, a year of
it was
always
going to be a
challenge.

Early
days yet, but I think Project 52 might be easier because it's more
focussed (or has that potential). One of the problems with 366 was
the feeling (self-imposed of course) that one had to keep on being
spontaneous: one wasn't writing a series (or not mainly), one was
simply producing a new poem possibility every day. The pile of
wreckage after a full year of doing this is, shall we say, daunting.
So much so that's actually easier to go on making daily drafts than
it is to really get stuck into tidying up the mess. But it takes time
to turn around a ship at sea. And maybe that's what we're looking at
here?

Reasons
for delight and disgust.

Vis-à-vis
Project 52, in 2017

where am I now?

do I ever
catch up with myself

I doubt it

but I do do
it every day

I have
arranged my life that way

Phil Hammial
(happy 80th!)
once told me

that he was
so disgusted with the way poetry was run in Australia

he decided to
just give it up for a bad joke

(my words not
his, so the paraphrase may not be perfectly accurate)

but he found
after trying this for a a bit

that he
actually felt physically ill

… and so he
went back to his writing practices

and with a
new perspective on them

I'm not
planning to get sick either

I'm planning
to go on forever

I know about
the best laid plans too

I know all
about that

But in any case, questions arise at
the wrap-up, including not only 'what was I thinking?' but 'was it a
good idea?' in the end, 'did it have the desired effect?', 'was it
worthwhile?', 'did it result in the making and the preservation of
more good poetry than might otherwise have been produced/preserved
had the project not happened?' I leave these questions to the
competence of the reader (who, knowing the work of at least some
participants, might browse the blog to make up their own mind).
I don't think my own experience is anything to go on really. Poets
come in various temperaments and while I think all of them, however
reclusive, participate in some kind of 'community of practice' that's
be no means to say that doing it together on a daily show-and-tell
basis is for everyone. There's a reason there's yet to be (to my
knowledge)
a slam named for Emily Dickinson. (Although I have to admit that I
discovered, in checking this
apparently outrageous
claim that the Emily Dickinson Museum at Amherst does indeed conduct
slams.)

Many poets of my long acquaintance
declined an invitation to join 366, quite a few others accepted but
never really got it together. A few climbed on board but quickly ran
out of steam. All of which leads me to conclude that the whole thing
was a little outlandish to some and a tall order for many.

Doing it and showing it every day
is odd, I think, for many who haven't been teachers of a creative
practice, and I believe a lot of us who made it through the month or
the year were indeed from that kind of background. For people who've
expected students to show and tell in every class, participating in
something like 366 might simply feel like a personal demonstration of
how one wasn't a hypocrite after all – I mean, of how one could in
fact oneself do what one was asking students to do. Many of us were
probably making this a late-career activity too, so probably it may
have been a safe bet at this point. Beyond that I do think creative
persons of every artform can probably be placed somewhere on a
sliding scale from precious to prolific (most probably find it more
like a see-saw than a continuum), but in any case a project like 366
clearly isn't for everyone. Very many poets are nervous about letting
(especially early) draft work see the light of day. Others worry that
there's something poserish about exposing one's process, or that it's
simply not helpful to them for anyone to see their private work
business. It's neither why nor how they do poetry.

All of this is fair enough. But
seeing poetry as something precious in one's life or in the world
more generally need be no excuse for preciousness. And I think
there's a strong argument for projects like 366 on the basis that the
precious assumptions about poetry are the ones most generally
prevailing in 'serious' poetry circles today. Many people see poetry,
and other artforms, as something they could not do themselves. And
possibly they couldn't, but how could we or they know if they didn't
have a go? This could just be what you'd expect in the way of
self-justification from a Creative Writing teacher.

In any case it's good to shake up
some of those precious assumptions – and it's good to run with that
key hypothesis common among teachers of a creative practice –
namely that, in this case, poetry exists as a product to consume
because people do it, and people might learn to do it better or more
easily if they can watch and also participate in the process.
Opportunities to do this outside of the classroom are I think rare,
dare I say precious. And what happens inside the classroom is rarely
as egalitarian I think as what we've been doing on Project 366.

Hobby and Vocation

Star systems are great killers of creativity, because they encourage
people working creatively to believe that greatness is some kind of
religious singularity mere mortals might not attain. When in fact
acknowledged greatness in letters is more obviously limited by the
capacity of readerships to take on the available material. In the
case of Project 366, now that it's more or less over, are we trying
to find a winner? In beginning to put together the anthology to
represent the project, the editorial group begins by asking each
participant to self-select a best work for inclusion (somewhat in the
manner of Phil Roberts' Poets' Choice
in the seventies).
Community is to encourage. Encouragement
is an act of faith. Let's at least try to have some faith in each
other's ideas about the worthiness of our own works.

Who's
interested in what we're doing? Who cares? There really are enough of
us doing it seriously and well these days for us to not need to care
about whether or not anyone else sees or cares. Ukulele orchestras
don't devote a lot of time to worrying about their audiences (however
nice it is to have one) – and neither should we.

A
community of practice, like Project 366, is an instance of
participatory culture – it's like a bushwalking group, or a gem
collecting group or a ukulele group. It's different from a book club
because it's about making the stuff, not simply soaking it up. Back
to the perruque, to stolen time.

Let's
admit it – poetry's a hobby. Let life consist of hobbies! If we
poets think that poetry is more interesting than cricket or bird
watching, it's not because we're better than cricketers or twitchers,
it's because this is our thing. And poetry is also a vocation. By
some means we are called to it. We never elude the possibility that
we are kidding ourselves. We never know if this splendid raiment we
don is from the emperor's closet or
prêt-à-porter
or really our own invention.

Poetry.
A hobby and a vocation. By contrast,
'professionalism' as it is understood today is a curse on creativity
from the economic world the-right-way-up. I think we need to embrace
hobbyism, to de-professionalise this métier.
We
need to accept
our calling to turn worlds upside down (or show how worlds are
that way and
might be righted).
To do this with the words at our disposal.

Recap.

Poetry
is at once hobby and vocation.

and
why?

because
we care for

the
truth

in
the heart

in
the voice

like
a hand held out

to
save the one drowning

never
too late

say
it

never
too late

say
it

and
it is so

in
poetry

in
music

paint

in
all the art

between
us

my
medicine

my
poison too

in
the storm

your
hand

I
take it

take
all the heart offers

all
that will save me

art
my raft

to
which life clings

dear
art

dear
heart

dear
life

*

poets!

a season of
love is coming

it's not a
kingdom

it's on Earth

and we won't
say republic

the whole of
the world will be out of doors

we'll call
our polity the picnic

and we'll
continue afternoon

as long as
suits

and we'll
imbibe

freely but
wisely

we'll each of
us

be muse and
mentor

standard
bearer, hack

who is there
won't anthologize,

while days
away in praise of skies?

we'll cut our
purse to suit the cloth

once money's
from the picture

poems will be
our currency!

Ginsberg
wants to pay with good looks

but some of
us are godawful ugly

still sing
like angels

(better,
cause we're real)

poetry's the
precious thing

not so for
rarity

but for
abundance

appreciated!

known!

poems in the
letterbox

every
magazine's for poetry

and every
poem's accepted too

not because
standards have fallen

far from it

no, because
every poem is good

everyone
knows how poetry's done

cause
poetry's for everyone

and rings in
the air when read aloud

and though
still chock with mysteries

every poem is
understood

because in
the time to be

poetry will
be the way of things

poetry will
rule

ubiquitous
poetic spirit

as wise as
worldly

philosophers
bow

before the
fact concise

made popular,
particular

made portable

made prompt

but hark I
hear a blowfly drone

there is a
smell of something rots

was creature
once as we

it seems a
long way to the light

when you sing
from the foot of the well

yes poets, we
write from dark times

and darker

this last was
a year of darkness coming

we may be
playing with ourselves now

we have that
old defence

we're
doing the best we can

we write now
for the time when

truth has set
all free

for the world
come green

we're to
observe

make paradise
our paean!

we're
bringing truth back into the picture,

with justice,
with freedom, with right

but we must
compose a way there too

a way that
can't be known yet

begins with
some simple words

they won't
swallow manifesto

if you call
it that these days

o brave new
world that we're beginning

no church
could be as broad as ours

the hundred
flowers are blooming

the hundred
styles and modes contend

here's
Cassandra

poets, on our
collective tombstone

these LED
lights coloured, flashing

BEWARE WHAT
YOU WISH FOR

fair enough,
she has a point

and there's
Zarathustra

railing from
heights

but let's not
let that get fascistic

Blake weighs
black with joy

Whitman wags
his tail

Dickinson's
still working in doors

Sappho's on
the way

o poets

we live for
such a time

beyond
ourselves

we live

!

Last Word from the Sacrificial Altar

I suppose it
behooves me – as he who cooked this up – to end with a rousing
call to pens or keyboards somesuch, but I should reflect briefly
first on how it's been for me personally,
as a participant. Was it a good thing to do, to be actually doing
each day? Did I produce good stuff as a result? Probably it's not for
me to judge that and it's certainly going to be hard for me to judge
my overall effort till I've actually worked through the year's
drafts. Nd
that might be a year or more away yet. But
poets do need to make some judgements in order to get works finished.
So that's all ahead of me, one way or another.

I guess
another serious issue is – was it a distraction to be working on
little things every day – things that might not amount to much,
things that might not come together convincingly – when probably
there were major works I could have been focussed on instead?

A personal note on process here. I tend to have
fairly distinct phases in my work – collecting, drafting,
revising/editing/polishing, leaving well alone, bouncing back to with
fresh eyes, generally piling up and failing to despatch... drifting
into the next thing and forgetting what was before...

I also have several distinct modes –
especially the peripatetic (I walk and collect lines with a pen or
pencil on paper) and the annotation mode (I read and I write in the
margins of other poets' work [I love blank space!] and then I type up
the marginal notes later and see if there might be any poems in
there… For a long time I thought of the annotation or marginal mode
as a kind of poetry of response (and I was actively hoping for poems
I could bill 'after …' [and I do have a lot of those]), but now I
realize what I was doing all along was simply following the principle
– in the presence so a poem comes
– i.e. when in the presence of a proper poem you have a good chance
of making one. I came to the conclusion that I wasn't really
necessarily in response mode by doing
what I was doing, because so very often
my marginal notes had absolutely nothing to do with the poem printed
on the page – no thematic, structural or other connection I could
discern. It was simply a case of having a good idea because of being
in a conversation worth being in. And
often feeling perhaps a little rude about it, as in – had I really
been invited into the conversation (?). Well, the words were there so
I thought I'd have my say too.

This annotation mode is I think similar to the
principle on the basis of which I think translation is excellent
training for poets – work with a structure and a whole that works
in one language to try to make something in your language: if you
succeed you have a good translation and a good poem; if you fail at
translation you might still have a good poem with a sound structure.
(If you don't have much in the way of other-language skills to get
yourself started on such a path, you can always dabble with
google-translate or something like that [and I mean this not just for
having fun coming up with crazy stuff, but seriously... think of
Bloomean misprision – out of mistaken-ness great new conceptions
come! Or can come! Or might be worth giving a burl at least]).

Stephen Spender wrote a wonderful essay, ‘The
Making of a Poem’, in which he contrasted what he called the
Beethoven and the Mozart methods of creative effort. Essentially the
difference is that Beethoven composed from fragments whereas Mozart
worked organically. Beethoven jotted down ideas and then later
assembled catches of tunes and ideas for orchestration into a whole
work. Mozart, by contrast, seemed invariably to begin with a complete
conception of a work and then to fill in the details as he finished
it. I think a lot of us naturally or unthinkingly tend to work one of
these ways or the other. Or we might
work one way in one phase of life (or the day) and another in
another. For those who do seem to be in the one mode mainly it might
be good for you to shake things up a bit in your practice, by making
yourself work the other way for a bit. For myself, I think I'm
naturally in the Beethoven mode, but I need more of the Mozart
approach – in order to do larger coherent works. I do indeed worry
that with 366 I was indulging the Beethoven side too much, allowing
things to be a bit too bitty. On the other hand the pressure to daily
come up with a complete coherent poem-draft entity – well that's a
pretty Mozart thing to be attempting. But I'm ambivalating out loud
again!

I have to
confess that I have indeed been putting off what I see as major
things (more in the prose line) for years, also work on some of my
dad's 'legacy material'. But I've always put that procrastination
down to the academic life. And now, is it the case that I have simply
elaborately tripped myself up, just when I might have started to find
the clear air to get on with the big stuff? The irony there would be
that that is exactly what I saw my parents doing with their lives
from the point of retirement (retirment
from
gainful employment) on.

There's yet
another way I might have tripped myself up, and that's by going too
far and too consistently into a draft mode of working. I think this
at least partly disturbed my normal writing rhythms of collecting and
drafting and revising – i.e. it favoured the early over the later
stages of the cycle. Had I engineered the kind of trap for myself in
which one cannot see the wood for the trees? I hope not, but it does
feel a little that way right now. Maybe I just have to follow that
moonlight cast through the forest in order to find the exit?

Or have I
sacrificed myself and my art on the altar of pedagogy? At least that
would be suitably dramatic.

A more
positive way to look at things would be to recognise that it is good
to shake things up in terms of one's practice and also to realise
that teaching (like translation) has been an important part of my
creative practice and that creating an on-line community of practice
was not just an interesting role model for students and others I'm
mentoring, but was a great inspiration for me personally. It was a
great thing to feel that I was working with others on a daily basis
and surely the pressure to produce on a daily basis will have got me
some personally worthwhile results. Attempting
to make a coherent work each day, however heroic the failure, might
yet be a helpful kind of Mozart-push. I'll
probably know more about that in a year, more or less.

Let me leave
these doubts here to resolve or heal or fester or whatever doubts do
and leave you with a little medley based on my Day 310 draft

13 comments:

I agree that the great benefit of something like Project 366 is that it runs counter to the star system and creates a space that didn't previously exist, affirms that any of us can write poetry, be read, taken seriously. The star system is arbitrary but also favours take work. Although writing daily may not be a necessary thing to this project, the creation of that space is fantastic. The Wonderbook of Poetry attempted something similar but didn't take off like Project 366 has, didn't quite capture us in the same way.It would be good if the space that's been created can be maintained, if Project 366 could become permanent. It's wonderful that Project 366 continues into the following year. I wish I'd been able to continue beyond halfway but was stopped by death in the family and physical problems. I envisage being a permanent participant in projects like these, want to jump back in when my energy returns.

Wow! so many things in this "rather long rant", but thanks a lot Kit,for expressing almost or exactly what I think about poetry and practice (in a community is just essential to me!and related to other artistic disciplines as well) . The same about the accademic milieu and the star system and so on and so forth! Not to mention that I wouldn't be here if I felt to have to do (or perform) my duty and I'm pretty happy to have this poetry hobby & vocation to enrich my life and make it even more intense! And yes I'll write for you all, and you'll all write for me, that's fantastic!

Thank you for this. I hope you are going to leave the metablog here as an archive! I think all our reflections are valuable. (Or does that just mean I personally like thinking and reading about poetry?)

Various off-the-cuff thoughts in response:

Ha ha, I just realised the New Age dictum 'follow your joy' is simply the latest way of saying that we should all be having a good time – and that I am a hedonist, having done my best to run my life that way, e.g. earning money only from work I love, even if the income is frugal. Depends what you think is a good time, I suppose. Reading and writing poetry is right up there, for me.

Embracing the blogging community (from 2006 on) immediately took me out of Ozpoetry into the international poetic world – albeit written in English, even by the European and Asian participants. In that world it's considered bad manners not to read and comment on the work of those who do that for you. It takes time, but I discover so many truly wonderful poets out there, in a variety of forms, styles, voices. And I see, over the years, that it's true we learn by doing. People who start out sharing weak, clumsy verses develop into beautiful, thrilling poets – because of being part of the community, as much as anything, I think. Playing in this arena means that some of our Oz colleagues – who are not 366 participants, interestingly – look askance at me for not subjecting myself to the judgment of editors of paper journals / anthologies. I in turn look pityingly on them for their blinkered view.)

Many in that community do also post about process. Remember when we we weren't supposed to do that cos the poem should stand alone? But it's interesting to an audience of other poets and some non-poet readers too (yes there are some out there). Also, people who don't want it are free to skip it; it's not the same as inflicting it on a captive audience.

I used to think poetry should be removed from educational curricula, too, and Judith Wright actually refused permission for her work to be taught in schools (though I think they did it anyway). But that was because of the atrocious way it was taught, and ruined for so many students. If poets such as yourself are teaching it, that's a different matter.

Spoken word poetry is reaching wide numbers of people these days – as witness Ashley Judd's performance, at the Washington women's march, of teenage Nina Donovan's 'Nasty Woman' poem rapidly going viral. Isn't that what we dreamed of in the heady days of the Poets Union, when we yelled from stages about taking poetry off the page?

I remember when – long, long ago – I used to think that if only one poem of mine could reach and move one person, it would be enough. I now know that it wouldn't have been. But it was a fervent dream, and I have far surpassed it. On the other hand, there was also the little girl, even longer ago, who always replied when asked what she wanted to be, 'A famous poet'. That ain't gonna happen. But by now it seems more important that poetry happens – and look! the number of practitioners keeps right on increasing.

The bigger the pond gets, the smaller we frogs appear. That's OK, it's nice to have company. Very nice!

Dear KitThank you for this inspirational, informative and fascinating ‘Rant.’ There are so many wonderfully expressed ideas including:‘The something that doesn’t love a wall is poetry …’‘I hope that poetry is more like a forest than a factory.’‘So poetry is process, is community, is something we do and something we say to each other.’

You’ve raised our plague of issues in an interesting way and left me with much more to cogitate but also maybe with a framework in which to (eventually) respond in some way. There is much I relate to, especially your belief in community.

I’ve said it in different places at different times but I should make a point of saying it here: the 366 community you created and welcomed me into buoyed me for the whole year and I appreciate it more than you may ever realize. I feel resuscitated thanks to you and all the other 366 poets and artists.

I especially take away with me the last three lines of your poem 'The words and their poem'.

A very considered and wonderful piece. Lots to ponder. Thank you very much indeed for creating a space in which we can write and be read, and where we can read each other's work and write about it. I'm grateful to have been welcomed here; there is such good company. Cheers.